30 March 2006 11:18 AM

Dave Cameron, the self-styled heir to Blair, continues to do my job for me, alienating and exasperating even the most loyal Tories as if he were deliberately trying to destroy his doomed party.

He sneers at opponents of new housing estates as 'bananas' - 'Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone'. Well, I'm afraid he has no idea what he is saying. People who have grown up as rich as Mr Cameron have very little idea of how much those who must buy their own houses with their own hard-earned money treasure any patch of green space nearby.

This is his problem, that he simply does not understand the middle class. He seems to think everyone can afford spacious homes, a neighbourhood of ordered peace, and either private schools or select, untypical state schools in nice areas.

He doesn't know how hard they have to work simply to stay in the same place. He doesn't know about the crime and the disorder that follow the drugs he is so soft on. He speaks for sheltered London toffs with second homes, but not for the great millions of people with just one home.

Each week that passes, I suspect that he is losing another few thousand voters forever. Meanwhile his silly green and pink flirtations win him the good opinions of the sort of people who would rather gulp a pint of strychnine than vote Tory. Brilliant strategy, Dave. Keep it up.

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The excitement over a new and supposedly better contraceptive pill is a sign that many women still - quite reasonably - worry about taking this rather frightening medication, which is designed not so much to do them good as to fool their bodies into behaving in an unnatural fashion.

The more I think about it, the more I am amazed that so many people have been ready to do such radical, powerful things to their most complicated and powerful working parts. Do we really know what we are doing?

And I am quite sure that men would not willingly swallow a tablet that did anything comparable to them and to their masculinity. Talk of a male pill will, I suspect, always come to nothing. Anyway, what woman would trust a man to take it regularly? He isn't the one who will get pregnant if he has forgotten to swallow his capsule.

Long ago I looked into the history of the pill and found that one of its main sponsors, Margaret Sanger, was a bizarre fanatic who believed so strongly in sexual 'freedom' that she urged her husband to take a mistress.

Eventually Sanger got together with the immensely rich old eccentric Katharine McCormick, who thought motherhood was tyranny and wanted to liberate women from it. They encouraged and paid for the research that led to the invention of the pill.

And they got their revolution. In fact, I cannot think of anything in politics or economics in the past 50 years that has had such an enormous effect on so many lives. But, in my view, not quite the effect that many people imagine.

It is always portrayed as a great liberator of women. But, once it became established, surely it was men who were liberated by it? They have grown to think they are entitled to expect women to be infertile, that this is their normal state. Sex is much more readily available, and - as far as liberated men are concerned - it is the woman's problem if it has the unwanted (by the man) consequence of pregnancy.

And so men are no longer made to pay the price for sex they used to have to pay - marriage, or even commitment. That doesn't matter so much when women are young. But what about later, when they decide that perhaps they do want children after all, and marriage looks more attractive as a way of life? Men - much less scared by the onset of middle age and used to getting what they want without giving much in return - face no pressure to behave, or to be unselfish.

I cannot help thinking that, however much it has made life easier and simpler, the contraceptive pill has a dark and unpleasant side, which is not discussed often enough.

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29 March 2006 12:23 PM

Anthony Blair, on a pointless taxpayer-funded jaunt in Australia, quite rightly condemns those who are anti-American. This is one form of racial bigotry that is acceptable among many educated British and continental people, who like to despise Americans and even refer to them by such inaccurate and outdated terms as 'Yanks'.

Funny it should be Mr Blair who makes this complaint. He belonged to the Labour Party when it was virulently anti-American, and far from opposing this stupidity he joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, whose whole purpose was to wreck the Anglo-American alliance which protected Britain and Europe from the Soviet menace.

He has never fully explained this and even tried to deny it. Whenever I go to America I now have to undergo the awful experience of listening to Americans praising my ghastly Prime Minister because they wrongly think that he joined the Iraq war out of courage, when in fact he did so because he didn't have the nerve to jump off the runaway train.

I try to explain what sort of person he really is, but Americans are so touched if anyone foreign shows them any friendship or understanding that they won't hear a word against him. What can I do or say? Yet this generosity of spirit is one of the things that makes Americans so likeable and America such a great and civilised country.

Supposedly educated British people, I have found, often sneer at small-town America because it is not as cool and funky as their fashionable part of London. But a better comparison would be between, say, Des Moines and Hull, or St Louis and Sheffield. And I would say that, for most people, especially the lower middle class, life is often much better, kinder, politer, more spacious and more hopeful in the American city than in its British equivalent.

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Leanne Black pelted photographers with eggs (which she had apparently brought with her in their box for this purpose, or why was she taking eggs to court?), hurled a jug of water at magistrates, screamed at probation officers, punched the lawyer who prosecuted her and ran screaming round the court where she was on trial. All this was shortly after she had announced that she was learning to 'control' her temper.

This person is now detained for four months, and banned from driving - though since she is too young to drive anyway and has repeatedly ignored the law this is hardly likely to change her life. She is 14 years old and was in court for her second drink-driving offence. She has also appeared before the bench for criminal damage, burglary, harassment and breaching a curfew. That's just some of it. She has already been to a 'secure unit' and much good it seems to have done her.

Black's mother, Nora, proclaimed to anyone who would listen that she was 'proud' of her daughter, and turned her bottom towards the cameras present, urging them to 'film this'.

How do we begin to imagine the home life of these two? Those who sneer at neat suburbs and the smiling two-parent families once portrayed in the old Ladybird Books might like to ask themselves if Leanne and her proud Mum, and the screaming and egg-throwing and bottom-displaying, is what they prefer.

For it seems to me to be a pretty straightforward choice. Either you have authority and self-discipline from the start, with somebody who cares enough about the child to do it the immense favour of saying 'no' from time to time, or you produce people who have never learned how to behave and quite possibly never will.

To get this authority and discipline you need a society where parents, neighbours, police, teachers, everyone, are together committed to bringing up children the right way. For example, if a child drops litter or vandalises a fence or rides his bike furiously along the pavement, scattering old ladies, adults should feel safe to step in, not scared to so, and their parents - when they are told - should discipline the child, not defend it.

I suspect that many of the children who go really badly wrong are actually just spirited and full of energy, and if only they had come up against consistent loving discipline early would be among the best and most valuable citizens.

Knowing no more about Leanne Black than what we saw in court on Monday, I don't know what her own family life has been like, exactly - though I think we can guess from her mother's behaviour that it hasn't been much like the Ladybird Books model.

But many of the boys and girls who end up in this sort of trouble are the victims of that horrible, worst possible sort of upbringing - neglect punctuated by indulgence. They're never read to, played with, talked to, they never sit down to meals with their parents, but they are given expensive toys and fashionable clothes and shoes, and TV in their rooms to keep them out of the way, and money to buy fast food.

No wonder, for to do all these good things, and avoid the bad ones, you need that boring old-fashioned family and that quiet, neat dull suburb, the way of life and the style of life that our wealthy, relaxed elite despise with all their hearts, see as a kind of prison, and seek to abolish.

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23 March 2006 10:58 AM

Politicians have a wonderful way of turning everything, even their own disgrace, to their own advantage. Both Labour and the Useless Tories have been caught out in their sneaky new practice of obtaining secret 'loans' from big donors. But rather than slinking away in shame, these worn-out parties have the nerve to use their exposure as an argument for what they call 'state funding' of political parties.

Neat, isn't it? They have been discovered doing something which is so obviously wrong that they tried to hide it. They then say, more or less "We will stop doing this if you, the taxpayers, give us so much money that we don't have to". This would be much like a burglar promising to stop burgling if he were instead given a special burglar's allowance. One, it would be utterly morally wrong. He didn't have to be a burglar in the first place. Two, you couldn't possibly trust him to keep his side of the bargain.

The major parties are in this fix because they are institutionally dead. Labour membership and Tory membership have collapsed during the Thatcher-Blair era, as both these parties have tried to appeal over the heads of traditional supporters, and to ignore their wishes. The fund-raisers, the canvassers, the envelope-stuffers and subscription collectors who keep parties going have died or drifted away, feeling that they are neither wanted nor needed.

I am told many Labour wards have had to merge with their neighbours because otherwise they can no longer get a quorum for meetings. The Tories, who debate less but socialise more, have a similar problem. The old wine and cheese gatherings have dwindled. Conservative Clubs now have to take non-Tories, even Labour voters, as members to keep their numbers up.

At their annual conferences, the seats are further and further apart to conceal the shrivelling attendance, the debates duller and duller, the average age higher and higher. Dissent is crushed. Yes, Labour roughly bundled Walter Wolfgang from the hall for heckling, with the disgraceful assistance of the police. But the savage Tory purge of Howard Flight, for mildly unorthodox remarks made at a private meeting, was not much different. Today's police - ever willing to keep a close eye on speech and thought - would no doubt have found a way to help, if the Tories had been the government.

The truth is the big parties mistrust and despise their members and their voters, and only survive by misleading them about what they are up to. That is why 'spin', or organised lying as it ought to be called, has become so common. That is why they seek money from wherever they can get it - and rich men always want to be on good terms with the powerful, or the potentially powerful. This sort of fundraising is squalid and discreditable, and ought to be banned.

But if it were, where would the cash come from to employ the parasites, propagandists, backstairs-crawlers and power-worshippers which modern political parties seem to need to survive? Why, nowhere, of course. So they seek to steal the money from us by force, through our taxes. Now, I regard tax as legalised theft already and suspect that about 90 pence in every pound I pay is mis-spent. But at least there is a reasonable excuse for this - it is after all meant for good purposes, health, education, pensions, policing. There is absolutely no justification for us being forced - under the threat of imprisonment - to pay for the slimy propaganda of political parties so discredited and clapped out that they cannot even raise their own running costs from their own supporters. The nerve of it.

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A little more on the Useless Tories, who I am glad to see have now sunk back in the polls to exactly where they were before Princess Tory was enthroned to the sound of hymns of praise and joy from the massed choirs of the BBC, the Guardian and the rest of the liberal elite.

Here is the problem: We obviously need a party which would take us out of the EU, restore criminal justice and law, reintroduce learning and discipline to the schools, support the married family, pull our troops out of the Iraq morass and re-establish an independent British foreign policy, meanwhile scrapping and reversing the nasty attacks on liberty made over the past decade.

Such a party - especially if it were not connected with the Tories - could gather wide support from all classes and generations disillusioned by the existing choice. Meanwhile the Tories themselves, ageing and decrepit, non-existent in large areas of the country, are incapable of unseating new Labour in one, or two, or three heaves. Indeed, it is hard to see how a party without a backbone can heave so much as a bag of sugar.

The best they can hope for at the next election is that Gordon Brown will lose his overall majority, and go into coalition with the Lib Dems, who are the Labour Party under a different brand. If that happens, the election after that will probably be fought under Proportional Representation, which means the Tories can never win again and our unique system of peaceful revolutions will be at an end.

So the issue is really quite urgent and it is very tempting to rush off and form a new party, hoping that millions will rally to its banner. But they won't, at least not for long . As Kilroy and UKIP proved, new parties can and do spring up and wither again in no time at all. Because the stakes are so small, they are terribly given to faction fighting and sometimes struggle to find candidates who are not embarrassing. I know of no example of such a party succeeding, ever, even with the help of multi-billionaires.

But that's only half the problem. Most voters are tribal. They vote Labour or Tory because they always have, because it's their badge, not because they have thought about it. They often don't want to think about it, thank you very much.

Many just can't grasp that anyone can stand outside this ancient contest, which is the latest version of Normans and Saxons, York and Lancaster, Roundhead and Cavalier, Whig and Tory. I have been fantastically rude about Labour for years, yet when I attack the Tories I get letters accusing me of being a Labour stooge. I am ruder about the Tories than any Labour commentator. Yet when I attack Labour, I get letters accusing me of being in Tory pay.

You won't penetrate this attitude with facts and logic. You might as well try and convert a football fan from, say Arsenal to Chelsea by the use of statistics, in my experience. These tribal loyalties will only shift if one of the parties is obviously tottering and preferably in ruins. The SDP, some will remember, almost succeeded as Labour seemed about to be taken over by the radical left - and then failed because Tony Benn was beaten in the contest for Deputy Leader. Labour then managed, ever so slowly, to pull itself together enough to survive. Labour itself only exists because the Liberals slowly but surely slid into the sea between 1916 and 1930.

So, if you seriously want any new politics in this country, then you must work for the collapse of the two existing discredited outfits (and of that jellyfish party which pretends to agree with everyone, the Lib Dems). They prop each other up, like two corpses with rigor mortis, leaning against one another. Knock one down, and the other will follow.

The Tories, even after the events of the past few days, are much closer to that collapse than Labour and their supporters can actually make a big difference if they want to. If Dave Cameron fails badly in the 2007 local elections( as he did at Dunfermline) it is very hard to see what can hold his party together. We can, actually, help them to fail by the simple action of not voting for them, and of writing, in a clear, literate hand "None of the above" on our ballot papers. By this quiet, determined abstention, we could set off the political earthquake that might just eventually bring about a political reformation and so return these islands to the government desired by their inhabitants, as someone once put it. Nothing else will work, least of all voting Tory.

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22 March 2006 4:12 PM

Once again we mourn a life lost thanks to the general feebleness of our cardboard criminal justice system. Poor Mary-Ann Leneghan is yet another victim of the bipartisan policy of letting bad people go free to stop the jails getting too full. Don't let either Labour or Tory make this into a vote-catcher. They are both responsible for the number of dangerous young men roaming the streets, unafraid of anything except each other. It was the Tory Criminal Justice Act of 1991 that automatically halved most prison sentences, and never let them forget it.

And they are also both jointly responsible for the weakening of family life, and for our gutless national attitude towards dangerous drugs, both of which played their part in this modern, very British tragedy.

In the old days of strong two-parent families, before the 1960s divorce reforms that shattered marriage, would Mary-Ann have ended up living the life she was living?

And in the days when we had a stern drugs law, enforced by large, confident coppers on foot patrol, would she have come within 50 miles of anyone selling the greasy poison, cannabis, which played such a part in the events leading to her appalling death in conditions of dark ages savagery?

I would also like to ask my fellow journalists to stop using the expression "experimenting with drugs" about such people as Mary-Ann. She was not 'experimenting'. She did not take notes or compare the evenings when she did not smoke dope with the evenings when she did, or measure the effects of different doses with scales and tape recorders. She was not studying the effects on herself, her family, her friends. That information is already available - the growing evidence that cannabis can trigger mental illness and does ruin the lives of those who use it and of those who love them. I am sorry to have to say it, but she was doing something wrong and dangerous. She should have been prevented, by morality, example and if necessary the law. Other lives such as hers could yet be saved if this point were understood.

As for the great social experiment of Letting It All Hang Out, begun amid such hope in the mid-1960s, isn't this miserable, unspeakably cruel death the final proof that it failed, that we got it wrong, that the liberal permissive society is less civilised, not more civilised, than what went before? Could anyone, in the Reading of 1960, have imagined such a thing happening in a park in his city? If granted a vision of the future, could he have believed that such things would be possible so soon? I don't think so.

So where are the social scientists who launched this supposed scheme for liberation? Why are they not confessing their failure, calculating the compensation and halting any further action? When is this disastrous test going to stop? How many more miserable deaths, destroyed families, ruined hopes, are necessary before the people who began this business have the courage to admit that this was not what they meant to happen?

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One day someone will produce a dictionary to help us understand what Archbishop Rowan Williams is saying. Most of the time, especially on controversial issues, he is incomprehensible in a lovely, rich, beguiling, poetic voice.

But here's something he is quite clear on, well, not clear actually when you read it again, but clearer than on most things. He doesn't want schools to teach something he refers to as 'creationism'. Now, a lot of rubbish is talked about this subject . There are, it is true, some Christians who believe that God created the world in six days, precisely as it says in the book of Genesis, and that the Earth is much younger than the fossil records show.

Most, however, reckon this beautiful passage of the Bible is not to be taken with literal exactness, though it does contain an important truth about the nature of the universe - that it is ordered, has a purpose and had a beginning. If this isn't so, why should Archbishops carry any more authority than lollipop ladies? Indeed, why have archbishops at all? If we are alone, and John Lennon is right, and everything's an accident, who needs these prelates?

The discussion about this, now flourishing in the USA, is much more interesting than most people in Britain realise. On this side of the ocean, everyone thinks that the theory of evolution is proved and settled, like the theory of flight or the (slightly more flexible) periodic table of the elements. Actually, that's not so. It cannot be. Darwin's theory - and that of his followers - is a heroic and impressive attempt to describe events that no human could ever have witnessed, on the basis of very thin evidence which cannot easily be tested.

And the theory of 'Intelligent Design', in its most powerful form as presented by some notable scientists, makes a far more modest claim. It asks permission for intelligent, educated people to doubt Darwin's theory, just as Darwin gave permission to the Victorians to doubt the existence of God. The Archbishop should read up on this. It could help to make his job more secure.

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16 March 2006 1:46 PM

The Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, is distinguished in the present government by actually being rather an intelligent man. What beats me is why he puts up with the stupid task he has been given, of ramming the horrible plan for Identity Cards through Parliament. On Monday night he had to endure gales of mirth as he pretended that the scheme was voluntary - when in fact all those who apply for passports will shortly be forced to place details of their eyeballs and fingerprints and personal details on the government's sinister new 1984 Big Brother register. Of course, if they decide never to go abroad again, then they won’t need to. If Mr Clarke thinks this is 'voluntary' then perhaps he should set an example by promising not to renew his own passport and stay at home for the rest of his life.

There are ministers in the Home Office so idiotic that they could convincingly pretend to believe in this rubbish. Mr Clarke is not one of them. This is what ambition has reduced him to.

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Huge numbers of criminal prosecutions are failing because the Clown Prosecution Service is not getting them ready in time. This a real and frightening scandal, far more important than various members of the New Labour apparatus taping each other's phone calls (I mean, do you blame them for not trusting each other?).

The urgent need for a new and radical political movement is shown most clearly by the continued failure of police, courts and prisons to frighten and punish evil behaviour, and the resulting dictatorship of crime and disorder in so many parts of the country. Here's another example. The probation officers involved in the John Monckton case, who were supposed to supervise the prematurely released criminal who killed Mr Monckton, are to go back to work after a brief two-week suspension, while John Monckton's widow and daughter suffer bereavement for life.

Very few politicians seem to know much about this subject, or really care, perhaps because so many of them live sheltered lives a long way from the raw menace of the rougher suburbs and the boiling drunken violence of dozens of town centres. Increasingly they resemble a complacent aristocracy, laughing off the misfortunes of the rest of the people and unable to grasp the depth of discontent around them, or hear the cries for help.